Alternatively, it could just be that chain e-mails never die.
"E-mail technology has made chain letters so easy and so powerful that they just explode out of control, and this is an example," said Alan M. MacRobert, a senior editor for Sky & Telescope.
A well-intentioned person forwarding a tearjerking chain letter—"Little Girl Dying of Cancer"—to everyone in his or her address book can quickly lead to several million messages if their friends respond similarly.
And if a message is undated, there's simply no such thing as a natural death, MacRobert said.
"Somebody sends it to their mother, who sends it to their great-aunt, who sends it to all of the great-aunts' bridge-club friends, and so on. And each of these takes a day or so," he said. "It could go forever, either till it gets extinguished by the reporting we're doing—fat chance—or people's interest dies."
Perhaps even more worrysome, the U.S. government's Hoaxbusters Web site cites rumors that spammers are harvesting e-mail addresses from chain letters and may even be starting them for that purpose. A popular chain letter could contain hundreds of e-mail addresses, the lifeblood of spammers.
"Spammers do farm addresses from chain letter headers," said Thomas Luparello, the vice president of systems operations for Ketchum, Idaho-based Wood River Technologies, an Internet service provider.
"I don't have a specific example of a spammer actually generating the chain letter, but they certainly have an incentive, since it would provide them with an easy way to acquire more email addresses," Luparello said.
MacRobert sees an upside to the Mars chain letter, calling it an immunization.
"If you get burned by sending this to your friends and family, and then they see on TV that it's all malarkey and only idiots pass chain letters, you're going to feel like a fool and be less likely to pass on the next one," he said.
Reality Check
Still, if you're an avid or even marginally interested sky-watcher, don't despair.
Mars will get especially near and bright at the end of October and early November, coming within 43 million miles (69 million kilometers) of the Earth.
"This will be the closest it will come until 2018," Sky & Telescope's MacRobert said. The average distance between the two planets is 48 million miles (77 million kilometers).
As for another claim in the "Mars Spectacular" chain letter—that the red planet will look as big as a full moon—it's true ... if you use a telescope that can magnify Mars to the power of 100.
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